Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Blog '08

The last few months have been devoted to quietly working, re-organising, re-thinking. Time to come out of hibernation, although these recent creative processes are in no way complete yet.

Probably the most visible fruit of these months is the online magazine Experimental Conversations, named after Fergus Daly's documentary of that title. Funded by Cork Film Centre, this is a journal of experimental film, art cinema and video art. I'm the editor!

Those out there who remember this blog's first incarnation and its deletion and its subsequent false restart will not be surprised that my videography has been subject to similar, convoluted metamorphoses, especially lately. I remember an old dream of a small, perfectly formed body of work snuggling smugly in the monumental shadows of Tarkovsky and Bresson, monumentally complete. Fifteen years on, what presents itself is a living mess, lurching, stuttering, self-devouring, as embarrassed as it is arrogant. Apparently finished works reduced to rushes, discarded footage rediscovered, a seemingly endless quest for completion becoming increasingly swollen and ungainly with time.

My videos are, for me, first and foremost diary works, although for the most part they share very few of that genre's features. I have a knack for filming documentary images and making them strange, creating images from them more proper to fiction. Yet when I film fiction, it normally ends up as what could be described as homemade found footage. Narrative as excuse for sounds and images that only find their place when the initial context implodes. My videos are 'diaries' in the sense that they reflect both imagined films that never quite emerge and 'real life' 'fictionalised', touched and distorted by cinema: precisely the ambiguous territory my brain occupies. Ruins, wrecks, memories, romantic, materialist- yes, a real mess.

And the context for these navel-gazing ruminations? I'm currently working on a video entitled Now Then: Notebook of a Decade , which is drawn from works I've made between 1997 and 2007. Now Then will be the last (?) resting place of many shorter works which previously circulated as self-contained pieces- and which will no longer do so. Editing on Now Then will take several more months.

My short videos up to 2007 which will not be recycled in Now Then and, therefore, remain available as shorts are:

One Long Breath (2005)*this film is not a lifesaving device (2005)Forgotten Films (2005)(Pr)Evens (2006, made with Tim Furey, documentary)Game of Truth (2006)Rendezvous (2006)FP: Lessons in Disquietude (2006)

Videos I have completed more recently are:(...from a dying hotel) (2007, for an installation)Making a Home (2007)Available Light (2008)Since (2008, site-specific video loop)Valley of the Kings (2008)Small Example (2008, documentary)Afternoons with Johnny (2008, documentary)

I'm also still working on editing the RTE funded drama Point of Departure.

Henceforth, this blog will primarily consist of news concerning my videos. If my work on the Experimental Conversations magazine can be seen as a public discourse, what appears here will be of a more 'private' nature, which is how I perceive much of my video work anyway. A way of living and negotiating reality.